Morpheus Data’s new features help VMware customers simplify hybrid cloud automation

Building on momentum from its recent v4.0 software release for Kubernetes, Morpheus Data has released another major set of new features – this time focused on helping VMware customers simplify hybrid cloud automation and avoid the lock-in from hypervisor focused approaches.

Morpheus has been recognized by Gartner as a Leading Cloud Management Platform (CMP) and plans to extend that leadership with Morpheus v4.1. VMware users who want to quickly realize the benefits of multi-cloud automation can now:

• Simplify automation while leveraging existing tools with Morpheus integration with vRealize Orchestrator workflows and VMware NSX enhancements.
• Take advantage of VMware on AWS without limiting automation options via Morpheus support for VMC on AWS in addition to dozens of other clouds.
• Quickly modernize legacy apps and enable new innovation with secure access to hundreds of AWS services directly from the Morpheus catalog.

VMware has long been a key technology in the datacenter, but many still struggle to turn it into the elastic and on-demand private cloud that it could be; this challenge is contributing to growth in public clouds like AWS.

A need to better manage both on-prem platforms and public clouds is evident in a recent 451 Research survey where 62% of enterprises identified hybrid cloud as their go-forward strategic IT approach.i

“The variety of cloud services and application platforms is expanding faster than ever and requires organizations to keep their options open,” says Brad Parks, VP of Business Development at Morpheus Data. “We’ve had a record number of enterprises choosing Morpheus as an agnostic solution for Kubernetes, VMware, and multi-cloud automation.”

Enable VMware private cloud and self-service automation in under an hour

After winning a Best of VMworld award last year for Agile Operations and Automation, Morpheus has continued to expand out-of-the-box integrations for VMware technologies and provide a simple upgrade path for vRealize Automation customers.

The most recent release adds vRealize Orchestrator support to the Morpheus automation engine, enabling customers to leverage existing workflows while upgrading to a more open and cost-effective multi-cloud management platform.

The new integration will instantly synchronize all available vRO workflows and organize by category. This enables users to trigger automation events from Morpheus as part of application provisioning or day-2 operations tasks.

Users can also easily chain together vRO and non-vRO workflows, inject Morpheus variables into the workflow, and pass input and output parameters between tasks.

Additional updates for VMware customers coming later this quarter include a major update to VMware NSX integration including support for the creation and utilization of transport zones, logical switches, edge services, and security groups.

These enhancements build on an already robust set of built-in integrations for VMware including brownfield discovery and provisioning automation for VMware vCenter, vCloud Director, VMware Integrated OpenStack, and Fusion.

Customers can automate VM and network provisioning, manage datastores and resource groups, migrate and convert images, auto-scale VMware applications, leverage VMware tagging, and more.

Leverage VMC on AWS for legacy apps and modernize with native AWS services

A majority of enterprises globally are using public cloud services, particularly for developing new applications. Even VMware has acknowledged this shift as evidenced by the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS.

This service enables simple migration of on-prem VMware workloads into the public cloud however many customers are opting for a 100% native approach to public cloud, working directly with AWS cloud services.

Morpheus v4.1 eliminates the need to choose between these options by now adding VMware Cloud on AWS to the dozens of clouds already supported. All existing features supported for vCenter on-premises are instantly available for customers who want to add VMware on AWS.

Clouds in Morpheus can be scoped and exposed to specific tenants, groups, and user roles to enable governance and hybrid application life cycle management.

AWS currently holds approximately 33% of the public cloud market and is on an annual run rate of over $30 billion. Much of the growth beyond basic compute and storage as a service comes from access to hundreds of cloud-native application services including analytics, blockchain, database, machine learning, IoT, and more.

With Morpheus v4.1, Ops teams can use Morpheus for secure role-based access and policy enforcement while still giving developers access to cloud-native application services from AWS.

Leveraging Morpheus integration with AWS CloudFormation, applications like Elasticsearch, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, and hundreds more can be easily added to the Morpheus service catalog and blueprinting engine or accessed via API and CLI.